Weird my mini split is a workhorse. It doesn’t give two shits about dust, dirt, ice, rain, or snow. It has heated the house in single digits and cooled the house in triple digits (both F). 10/10. Best $1800 I ever spent.
For real, mini splits are insanely powerful. They’ll make a room frigidly too cold in nanoseconds if you ask them to.
I wouldn’t say nanoseconds… might be my system with multiple units,but one can take a minute to get its bearings. Once on though I really only need one unit for the whole place despite having 3.
Planned Obsolesce!
No. Industrial air conditioning units are showing the same thing. They are getting lighter and better at cooling.
Control panels some times need air conditioners. Old enough companies, like my ex-employer, can even pull up records to show that the shipping weights are going down. Lost a bet with my old boss about this.
No. I had a ductless split AC cooling a small server room. 4 server racks. It ran 24x365 for 12 years before the compressor failed. We replaced it with another ductless split that is ceiling mounted. They are great products.
As with anything, you get what you pay for.
Or you could replace only compressor
also, I’m leaking CFCs and trying to claw a hole in the ozone
The old window ACs were really goddamn durable. These current window ACs die when the wind blows. Mini splits really are magic though.
My old AC works great. I just wish I could hear other things while it’s running.
This funny meme is also a good example of survivorship bias. There are both good and shitty ACs from both eras. We’re just only comparing to the good old ACs because the shitty ones already broke.
The same seems to apply for old music as well - only the “good stuff” survives and everything else is forgotten
Pretty sure all of my old apartments had the shitty window units, none of them ever worked.
While I agree with you past generations weren’t swamped with infinite selections of shitty versions of products at their fingertips. Think it feels worse now because it’s harder to find the good stuff these days
It’s had a lot to do with manufacturers trying to cater to a certain price point where they can maximize sales and profits, rather than simply trying to make the best product they can make. It leads to a lot of cheap garbage.
That’s a very valid point. Today’s ease of access to a wider variety of sources is vastly different to the pre-internet era of appliance shopping. Back then, we just went to the nearest Sears or some other appliance warehouse to try them out. They’d have just a few different models available, so those were all your options. The other method of purchase was through direct shipping catalogs, where you hoped the product you bought didn’t actually suck.
That is true, although earlier generations didn’t have access to as many different variations of a product, most of the ones available to them were the high-end versions. The trade-off is that they costed much more due to being a more premium product and being new on the market.
It’s true with most appliances.
The problem is it is difficult to know today which appliances will still be functioning in 20 years.
Which air conditioner are you talking about specifically that shuts off when it gets dust on its filter?
It’s not that they shut off, it’s that many units are sized so questionable for the square footage they are able to cool that the filter being dusty or clean is the difference between being able to cool the room to the target temperature or not.
Right so people bought cheap and now are upset that it doesn’t do the work.
Yep.
The neat thing is that with mini split technology, cheap AC actually exists.
The buyer decides the size. Consumers bought the wrong sized product for the job and now they blame the product and want to claim they are being exploited???
Truly shocking.
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Drain line can clog, but as with all dad stuff, good maintenance wins the day
Even better, they now sell window units that drape over the sill on both sides for less noise, less blocking the window, no danger of falling, window closes farther
But the first needs at least two power lines to work.
*220V
CoP of negative 10.
I miss my old really noisy air conditioner window unit. I loved the noise from it, it drowned out other sounds and I got better sleep. My room air filters generate some decent white noise effects, but it’s just not the same.
The best part about window units is the dank freezer smell they emit. Sometimes I just stand there and smell it while enjoying the cool air on my face.
Ozon?
Mold and mildew.
Legionella
That old, toxic refrigerant just hit different
You can do a 1:1 swap of refrigerant, and if I remember correctly, the new stuff actually works better.
Heck, early refrigeration systems used friggen ammonia as it’s refrigerant of choice. Works good at being compressed and evaporated, shame about it being poison.
Didn’t know that, I was thinking of the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) we used like 30/40 years ago
The reason those took off so well is cause Freon, while awful for ozone, is significantly safer than the previous usage of ammonia.
Refrigerators and air conditioners just compress a gas into a liquid, moves it through piping, and then decompresses the gas. When compressing the gas (a refrigerant), it’ll want to turn liquid, but has to burn off heaps of excess energy, done as heat energy. That’s done in the part of an AC unit that hangs outside. The liquid is then pumped to the other side of the machine, relieved of pressure, and sent through tons of piping with heat grates and fans for dissipating the cold air it generates. When evaporating from liquid to gas it needs to take in heaps of energy, so it’ll draw heat from the air, cooling it. The gas is pumped back to the compressor on the other side of the unit to repeat the process over and over. Propane is really good at being compressed like that, and it has minimal effect on global warming, so it can be used as a freon alternative. Just yanno, don’t use it in your car’s AC.
Dope thank you!
My man just casually explained the refrigerator cycle, well done
Deffo gotta thank Technology Connections on YouTube for making it so simple to understand.
Yeah, that’s how I learned it too, but its funny how he has 4 40min videos about it, or things that use it
The new stuff just doesn’t taste the same.
Air conditioner then: 2 kilowatts / ton
Air conditioner now: 0.4 kilowatts / ton
can someone explain this for the uneducated?
It’s another one of those weird non-metric units. In the world of air conditioning (or cooling in general), a “ton” is the amount of cooling you’d get from melting a ton (a short ton - that is 2000 pounds) of ice that’s already near its melting point. Air conditioners are usually rated in tons per day, with 1-5 tons about right for a typical apartment or house, depending on things like square footage and climate.
(side note, thank you for the explanation)
Ffs USA. YOU’RE ALREADY USING kW, JUST GO FULL METRIC ON POWER. Please I’m begging you.
COP = heat moved / power input
kW_out / kW_in = dimensionless value
An air-conditioner with a COP of 2 moves 2 kW of heat for every 1 kW of electrical power you put in.
This hurts so much to find out because the US is already using BTU/hr 🤢. What do you need yet another unit for power for?
You’re using W, BTU/hr and ton/day?
Like. Why are you doing this?
😭 look what they did to my boy (units)
It’s another one of those weird non-metric units. In the world of air conditioning (or cooling in general), a “ton” is the amount of cooling you’d get from melting a ton (a short ton - that is 2000 pounds) of ice that’s already near its melting point.
Wut? I though it was unit of power per mass of machine. Why, just why?
That makes sense actually. Thanks!
In the world of air conditioning (or cooling in general), a “ton” is the amount of cooling you’d get from melting a ton (a short ton - that is 2000 pounds) of ice that’s already near its melting point.
I’m the kind of person to argue the merits of the imperial system, and even I think that’s bonkers.
What do you think the metric system is based on? It’s the exact same thing.
0c is the temperature of water freezing (at sea level, etc.etc.)
100c is the temperature that water boils.
1 kilocalorie is the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1kg of water one degree.
You have to define energy in some way, and almost all of it is related to how it affects water.
Calories are not metric. And there are even two calories. Not as bad as 10 different inches, but use Joule(metric unit, Newton*meter) instead.
What do you think the metric system is based on?
Fingers.
In Air Conditioning a “ton” = 12000BTU of heat removal per hour.
It originates from the amount of heat removal over a period of 24 hours needed to freeze a ton of water at 0C:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_of_refrigeration
A quick idea of what cooling/heating you need is your square footage (assuming 8ft ceilings) x 20.
So 600 sq ft of area would need a 1 ton AC or 12,000BTU. Again complicated by outdoor temperature, insulation of the home, and other factors.
Anyway, what the op was saying, for the same tonnage (cooling capacity) old ACs used a ton of electricity. Newer split units are crazy efficient.
Like in 2000 the new requirement for a home AC was a SEER (cooling vs electric usage) of 10. The higher the rating, the less electricity used for a given cooling capacity.
Nowadays you can get the cheaper split units which have ratings of 19-23 SEER2. So they use half or less than half the electricity for the same cooling. Also they can work as heaters in a pinch.
Edit: Quick googling shows that ACs from the 80s could be as inefficient as 6-7 SEER. So a modern 21 SEER2 unit would use 1/3rd the electricity!
WTF BTU is? Bitcoin fork?
British thermal unit. Been around for a century or more and will be around for another century after Bitcoin is gone. I say this owning Bitcoin.
I really hope for my sanity that the US at least switches fully to kW and kWh. They’re already using it!
He’s saying they improved in efficiency
Can’t we have like .8 kw / ton thats twice as reliable?
What is planned obsolescence?
You can buy whatever size AC you want. When you cheap out and buy one that is too small you don’t get to cry “planned obsolescence”. That was your choice, not someone else’s plan.
A way to destroy the earth for temporary profits while guaranteeing the future generations to be screwed because we exploited all the resources in chase of a quick buck?
I think Ziltoid was doing a jeopardy, but it was nice to answer the question either way.
You can have a super efficent one that’s reliable. Not gonna be super cheap, though. But they exist, as server rooms and critical infrastructure has to be cooled as well. Mitsubishi Heavy makes stuff like that for example.
Reliability exists, just don’t buy crap. Invest and reap the efficiency. Personally, I’ve spent years with mini-splits and never had this filter problem crap, everything just works and for less than half the cost.
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pathetic thing that looks like WALL-E’s girlfriend attached to a clothes drier vent. If you get five feet away from it you’re dying
I hoped that was a Technology Connections link, and I was not disappointed.
Thank you so much for that link! It was wildly pertinent to my life
I just moved into a new place this weekend. It has an addition not connected to central A/C. Instead, it has a little window unit, but also a (one hose) portable unit.
I was using the portable one, because I haven’t had time to block the hole that runs outside (especially from critters climbing through). So I hoped that the air blowing out would discourage anything from climbing in
And now I will be taking the time to properly block the hole where the duct runs, because I immediately switched back to the window unit after watching that video
So thank you again! It’s the first time I ever encountered a portable unit, so I knew nothing. And coincidentally, I just moved and had the option to use either the window unit or the portable
Just ridiculously relevant to my life as of this weekend! And ya just saved me money on electricity. You’re awesome for that link my friend
Every time I’ve gone to move to a new place, central air has been my top priority. I refused to consider homes that relied on window units, swamp coolers, or those floor units that are basically a scam.
I live somewhere with cold winters and hot summers though, maybe I would feel different somewhere with more mild seasons.
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Some significant amount of the heat that should go outside, instead gets put back into the room through the “clothes dryer vent”.
Given the cost premium, and space used, by floor standing ACs, they’re really not worth it if you have an option.
I covered mine with a mylar emergency blanket and it’s dropped the temp quite a bit. Not perfect, but it works in Texas
Yes the older models are the little engine that could. (come to think of it most of you are too young to get that reference). The expensive big one threw a belt and became useless after four years.
But I moved to a place where I’m on the shady side of the building and as a result all I need are fans.
There’s no belts on ductless mini splits lol
You might be about 15 years behind technology
Those big ones with the pipe piece, the standing ones, have belts.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I work with these things. Standing ones?
Are you being purposely obtuse or is it your first day on the job? They are referring to an AC compressor for central air.
The person you replied to never used the term “ductless mini split”. You did. They were simply describing an AC system and you assumed they were talking about a split.
The picture that is being referenced shows the evaporator unit from a heat pump mini split system.
Central air conditioning system or bust 😂
For real though, never lived in a place that had these window units. Guess these are more common on the east coast.
Consider a series of smaller units and one outdoor unit. Together they do the exact same thing as your central ac but for 1/4 of the price.
Imagine 1/4th the electric bill! Then look at your current setup and ask yourself whatever you need about the east coast, as long as you need… everyone else has the same cooling as you with 1/4 the cost. Sooo central or bust amiright? Keep paying / throwing away your money, more than everyone else… and why?
Look into the engineering of evaporating and condensing a material in a slightly different way than you are used to… it’s not weird.
Forget the hippy shit. You are paying 4-5x the cost for the same result. Feel free to keep throwing away money. The rest of us don’t care. We’re not on the “east coast” but we pay less than you regardless…
Mini splits air conditioners (the one on the right) have some major advantages over central air.
With central air there’s one big condenser and evaporator for the whole house and dampers are used to block the chilled/heated air to zones that aren’t requesting for air. Since all the zones share the same air source, the more zones that need heated/cooled the slower it’ll take. This system also prevents one zone from requesting heating while another requests cooling as the system can only do one at a time.
Now with mini splits each zone gets it’s own condenser and evaporator meaning each zone is free to heat/cool to each zones needs and airflow isn’t effected by other zones. The biggest reason why mini splits are better though is because if there is an issue you’ll only lose one zone instead of the entire HVAC as you would with a central unit.
Just move to a temperate climate. I’ve never had AC and only regret that for about 5 days a year. You learn to plow through that.
As someone that lives in the arctic my AC (Inverter heat pump) has been running daily for over 2 months this year.
I miss summers where we didn’t have two months over 20c, I have no idea where I can move to get away from this fucking unbearable heat at this point.
Of course I’m being silly, but here in the Netherlands I’ve really not needed it that much in my current house. Only my home office and attic get a bit too warm, but I have alternatives for those rooms and I’ve only seen my living room get up to 26 degrees at the hottest. For a few days a year I think that isn’t that bad or worth the hassle and cost of an AC.
My previous house was much worse. A couple of years ago it got up to 40 degrees Celsius and it was 34 degrees in my living room.
Since I live in the arctic my home is well insulated, which is great because it also keeps heat out! Buuuuut it also traps in all the heat that accumulates over the 60+ days over 20c we’ve had this year… I can’t get to sleep in temps above 20-21c and my livingroom being over 24c or so would make me have horrible migraines.
With climate change, those regrettable 5 days a year will become months long in the coming years.
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But then you just move to a temperate climate again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As heat waves are becoming more common, lots more people are wanting air conditioning in places where it was previously seen as a waste of money. Retrofitting existing housing with central air generally isn’t feasible, so all types of air conditioning have their place. The worst are portable units, but in a lot of places they’re the only option that works.
